The Intake

Briarstone Recovery Center boasts a 0% readmission rate. But their patients don't stay sober. They just never leave. Kit Devereaux is a talented occupational therapist running from a tragic professional mistake. When she is offered a position at Briarstone, an elite private rehabilitation facility nestled deep in the isolated Adirondack Mountains, it feels like the perfect fresh start. The campus is beautiful, the doors are unlocked, and the medical director is warmly supportive. But as Kit begins her sessions, the cracks in the pristine facade begin to show. Patients who are clinically recovered are kept on-site for months—even years—funded by endless family trust payments. Medication regimens are secretly designed to control and sedate, not to cure. And when wealthy families finally stop paying, the facility initiates a "Discharge Protocol"—a rapid, calculated release process that has already left three former patients dead within weeks. Kit realizes she wasn't hired for her skills; she was chosen because her past guilt makes her easily controlled. Now, trapped in a system built on forged signatures, dark money, and psychological manipulation, she must find a way to expose the lethal operation before the next patient is "discharged". But in a facility where every piece of paper is a lock and every diagnosis is a cage, getting out alive might be the hardest treatment plan of all.